Focault
Boundaries by definition have always produced limited consideration, have reduced diversity of dialogues and have thrived upon exclusions. For political reasons, he is in favor of a world that has less fascination with 'aura' (understood in a general sense). Foucault believed that the captivation with concepts such as 'humanity', 'art' or ' architecture' served to obscure the relation between the individual and knowledge by means of the apparatuses that administer modern society. The relevance of this point has grown recently as modern societies (alarmingly including academia) have been administered with lesser concerns for the relationship between individuals and knowledge. Instead, in the societies of late capitalism, the emphasis has been on knowledge that is relevant for performativity (Lyotard 1979)
Gordana Fontana-Giusti about Focault
Archaeology
Focault has established that every historical period is characterized by a fundamental paradigm (understood as a particular standard) which delineates the cultural production of specific types of knowledge – the episteme.
Epistime is shared by all knowledge and is the implied precondition that determines and makes it possible for all related discourses or works to emerge.
Andrei Piotrovski – Architecture of Thought (opens up Focaults question – what does it mean not to be able to think a certain thought any longer?)
Focault is interested in a new kind of archive because the old type was a problem. It privileged and perpetuated certain objects and discourses by means of its organization, choice of documents, underpinning discourses, and so on. It was the obstacle and the reason why so many things, said by so many men, for so long, have not emerged in accordance with his own laws of thougts or set of circumstances. (..) Focaults archive is spatially set between the language that defines the system of constructions possible sentences and the physicality of the archive that passively collects the spoken words.
Madness
Focault aimed to evoke an understanding of madness as a simple difference in behavior or attitude, rather than a different category that from the start dismisses the mad from the realm of reason and/or knowledge.
Foucalt thinks that the reason for the figure of the 'ship of fools' becomings the subject of many texts and images lies in the fact that it symbolized a great disquiet dawning on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages.
A split appeared first of all between two forms of madness: on the one hand, the madness as in the paintings of Bosch (in the last years of the fifteen century) and on the other; the madness as described in Erasmus;s In Praise of Folly (1509). The former sees madness as troubling, obsessive and threatening, 'seemingly revealing the deep secret into which the truth of our world of appearances vanishes; while the latter' was already madness set at a distance' and caught in the discourse, elaborated in books and preached about at universities. The gap between two grew from then onward.
Madness was often seen to be at the heart of things – an ironic sign, that marks he space between the real and the imaginary.
The hospital became a place of confinement, allowing the wealthy and the privileged to clean up the increasingly growing and messy city. The poor, the idle, beggars, vagabonds, the debouched, libertines, those with veneral diseases, prostitutes and homosexuals joined the insane behind the walls of places such as Hopital General in Paris
Since the emergence of Foucault;s discussion on panopticism, it has become impossible to see architecture as neutral, simply aesthetic or merely functional.
Sexuality
Focaults highlights the strangeness of the claim that sexuality has been the subject of repression precisely at the time when it was coming into prominence and gaining affirmation. He finds this insincere and concludes that the statement about the oppression of sexuality the 'sermon; about it in facts paradoxically and crucially reinforce each other.
This led him to the findings that sexuality, ethics and knowledge in antiquity were inextricably linked within the structure of the aesthetic experience
We cannot equalize the content of 'I think' to the content of 'I am', because the content of the subjects reality is always more than the content of any merely thinking self. The fact is that individuals are living, working, desiring and speaking subjects: these conditions take any individual beyond the realm of mere thought.
Altough it is not always transparently clear, it was in part due to Foucault and his followers that architects shifted focus from concerns about the built form to the design of space itself. Crucially, Foucalt demonstrated that this space is not neutral or empty bu a space of social relations, He recognized the role of architecture in allocating people and in organizing various flows of movement within urban contexts – what we might call architecture as exoskeleton.
“It is true that form me, architecture, in the very vague analyzes...is only taken as an element of support, to ensure a certain allocation if people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations. So it is not only considered an element in space, but is especially thought of as a plunge into a field of social relations in which it brings about some specific effects”
Heteretopia.
“Heterotopias constitute a sort of counter-arrangement of effectively realized utopia, in which all the real arrangements... that can be found within society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged, and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localisable.”
Heterotopias are privileged, sacred or forbidden places, often reserved for the individual in crisis.